False Creek South: It’s near perfect, and it’s mine

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It’s hard to believe that not that long ago serious consideration was given to filling in False Creek and paving it over with homes and roads.

Architect Stanley King was among the first to challenge that idea and to imagine a residential community with a public market as its centrepiece built along the creek’s south shore on derelict industrial land.

Over tea on Granville Island overlooking a pond that was once a “car graveyard,” King told me how many of the ideas for the False Creek South community and Granville Island Market came from a teaching exercise that involved not only his students, but nearly 1,000 Vancouverites.

It started in 1972 with King doing 94 watercolour paintings of a wide array of urban activities. He reproduced them and then, with his students, sat at tables on the island, on Robson Street, East Hastings, Denman and Broadway to talk to people. They also went to libraries, seniors’ homes and visited children in hospital.

People were handed copies of the drawings and asked to separate them into three piles. One was for things they did in their own neighbourhoods; another for what they wished they could do. The third was the reject pile. All but two people put car traffic into that one.

Overwhelmingly, people chose images of farmers’ markets, waterside market stalls and street sellers. This was at a time when North American planners and politicians in cities like Toronto and Seattle believed public markets were unsanitary and were debating demolishing ones like the St. Lawrence and Pike Place.

They chose cycling and walking paths next even though, at the time, suburbs and shopping malls were springing up everywhere and only kids rode bikes.

Water sports, picnics in the park, festivals, music of all sorts and even a waterfront concert hall also ranked highly.

When King and his students reported their results in the summer of 1973, it was highly controversial. What could “ordinary people” know about the complicated business of designing communities?

But two councils led by Art Phillips mostly followed the False Creek plan and the federal government kicked in the money for Granville Island.

The wisdom of the people has clearly worked, at least for King and me. We both live in False Creek.

“What we have exceeds what I expected,” King said, as I flipped through the nearly 40-year-old drawings, which presaged everything that I love about my neighbourhood.

It starts with walk-ability. King has given up his car; I drive fewer than 5,000 kilometres annually. There’s no need to drive in this community, which has Granville Island as its heart and the seawall as its spine. Its arteries include Granville, Burrard, Cambie, 4th, Broadway and the creek itself. By water, using Aquabus or Granville Island ferries (shown in the drawings) make Yaletown, downtown and parts of the West End extensions of this area.

Water defines the neighbourhood. Seagulls screeching. Bald eagles nesting by the Maritime Museum. Herons. Resident seals. An extraordinary sighting of an orca in the creek a few years ago.

They’re all part of the landscape and, for me, more important than the mountains, the glass towers opposite or even the perfectly piled strawberries in baskets at the market.

It’s almost impossible to live here and not gain a mild obsession for food. Almost everything a foodie heart desires is at the market. Oyama’s sausages. Fish. Fresh-made soup stocks. Breads. Almost every spice, exotic fruit, vegetable or sauce imaginable.

Don’t want to cook? Many of the city’s best restaurants are within walking distance.

Entertainment? The island has live theatre, buskers, galleries and a church that shares space with the TheatreSports League. Up the hill, there’s more of everything.

Besides water, there’s lots of green space — a balance to what was in the 1970s a high-density development. Now, compared to the creek’s north shore, the low-rise buildings with their mix of different housing types for different income needs seem more quaint than a template for future communities.

My new, favourite place is the waterfall that King took me to that I’d never seen before. It’s near False Creek elementary school, although getting to it from the seawall can be a challenge as you cross the off-leash park and navigate the scramble of dogs, balls and Frisbees.

What else do I love? Kites flying at the perennially windy Kits Point. Walking to Bard on the Beach. Float homes at Granville Island. And the very idea of Emily Carr University.

I love the government dock at the foot of 1st Avenue where I can buy fish off the boats and Go Fish! when I don’t want to cook.

And I love Ocean Cement because it provides jobs and reminds me of the area’s industrial past. It’s also a company that tries hard to be a good neighbour. Some of its cement mixing barrels are whimsically painted with strawberries and asparagus. At the plant’s entrance, there’s a wonderful, kinetic sculpture made by artisans on the island and, every year, the company has an open house.

It’s almost churlish to be critical of a neighbourhood that has so much. But as King and I walked along the seawall, we talked about what could make it better.

We’d both ban cars from the island and give it over fully to pedestrians, cyclists, service vehicles, street markets, buskers and cafes. (Yes, I welcome your letters and emails.)

We’d both make the water more accessible.

Along the seawall, there’s a wide, wooden platform. Rarely used, it’s deliberately avoided by most cyclists and walkers. It cries for something as does the deserted Leg-in-Boot Square.

King would get rid of the “boat parking lots” and move the civic marinas closer to Georgia Strait to give people more access to the water. I wouldn’t. Boats are a welcome part of my urban landscape, including the bell-like sound of halyards against masts when the wind blows. .

Those are mostly tweaks. But nearly 40 years out from the plan, King and I share a deeper concern for the future. Almost everything built is on leased land and homeowners’ leases on the city-owned land end in 2036, making it now more difficult for buyers to get a mortgage since banks won’t finance a property within five years of a lease’s end.

Property values could drop. Owners (some still struggling through the leaky condo debacle) forced to sell might find no market at all and be forced to walk away, leaving buildings empty. Worse, planners, politicians and developers might take the land back, bulldoze the low-rises and replicate Yaletown’s highrises without asking what we want.

Meantime, we’ll enjoy what we have even as we wait for some signal from the city about its long-term intentions for our near-perfect neighbourhood.

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